Sunday, April 22, 2012

Jason (barely) goes to SFIFF--Day 3

I missed almost all of the festival on Sunday. I had my volunteer work at the Niles Film Museum until 4, and then I decided to stay down in the south bay to see my beloved San Jose Earthquakes take on Real Salt Lake. Long story short, the good guys won on a couple of goals in added time (actually, their first goal was in added time in the first half, so apparently they liked to wait until it's really dramatic to score.) But it never should have been that close with Real Salt Lake getting two red cards. And even though we were the bigger beneficiary, I have to say the refereeing was terrible. Not that either red card was undeserved, but the ref just wasn't consistent and generally lost control of the game and respect of the players.

But I digress. The important thing is I raced from San Jose back up to the Kabuki just in time to catch the Peaches Christ show Acid Queens: Peaches and TOMMY, in honor of Ken Russell. Peaches, of course, ran the pre-show. Her backing band did a few numbers from TOMMY--Eyesight to the Blind (with Peaches as Marilyn Monroe), Pinball Wizard (with Peaches on vocals), and finally Acid Queen. Then a quick video tribute to Ken Russell, which really made me want to see a whole retrospective of his work. At best I've only dabbled in his work--I've seen LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM, THE DEVILS, and of course TOMMY, but that's about it.

But here's the thing, I never saw TOMMY on the big screen, and I saw it so long ago and was so naive for some reason all I remembered was he was a very popular pinball wizard. TOMMY is barely, superficially about pinball. It's really about child abuse and religion. And it's about wild, over-the-top costumes, set designs, and visuals. And it's about The Who's music. And it's wild, insane, and just tons of fun. Like Peaches said in her pre-show, the great thing about Ken Russell is even if you're not on acid (for the record, I was not on acid) Ken will make you feel like you are.